Black recent college graduates

Posted
on May 21, 2014, 12:37 pm

As Heidi Shierholz, Alyssa Davis, and Will Kimball have documented extensively in a recent report for the Economic Policy Institute, the Great Recession has been very hard on young college graduates. In a CEPR report released yesterday, Janelle Jones and I show that the tough economy has been even harder on black recent college graduates.

In 2013, the unemployment rate for black grads (ages 22 to 27) was 12.4 percent, more than double the already elevated 5.6 percent rate for all graduates in the same age range:

And over half (55.6 percent) of the black college graduates that did have jobs were “underemployed” in occupations that typically do not require a college degree: